Between the environment and the economy: foreign investments, global conservation, and Indigenous nations in the Amazon

ABSTRACT

Where is the communities’ voice when their territories are intervened by either extractive projects advanced by transnational corporations or environmental initiatives advanced by global conservation actors? These actors allege that their projects deeply engage with sustainable development, in practice, however, national policies and governmental actions over the forests tend to prioritizing the environmental or the economic angle of sustainability, obscuring the political aspirations of Indigenous nations. By analysing these interventions in the Peruvian Amazon, this paper explores how Indigenous peoples’ political agency is located between these two global forces. Nonetheless, by using the discourse and standards of internationally recognized indigenous rights, they fight for the recognition of their nationhood and territorial entitlements as well as for their self-determination to engage with economic and environmental agendas from their own worldviews.

KEYWORDS:

• Foreing investments
• protected areas
• Indigenous peoples
• political ecology
• sustainable development

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Roger Merino

Roger Merino, Ph.D. is Associate Professor at the School of Public Management, Universidad del Pacífico (Lima, Perú). His research areas include political ecology, international environmental governance and indigenous rights. He has published research articles in leading journals, such as World Development, Third World Quarterly, Leiden Journal of International Law, The Extractive Industries and Society, Bulletin of Latin American Research, and Oxford Development Studies. In this last journal, he won the Sanjaya Lall Prize for the best article published in 2016. He has also co-authored a chapter on indigenous philosophies and development in the Routledge Handbook of Development Ethics (Routledge, 2018), and is the author of a chapter on indigenous self-determination and free, prior and informed consent in the book Indigenous Peoples as Subjects of International Law (Routledge, 2017). Two of his latest research articles have been accepted for publication (forthcoming, 2020) in Latin American Perspectives and Environmental Policy and Governance. He has also been Visiting Scholar at Harvard University and the Institute for Advanced Study of Princeton.

Ady Chinchay

Ady Chinchay is Ph.D. candidate in Sociology (Pontificia Universidad Católica del Peru) with mention in Sustainable Development (Free University of Berlin). She is also an environmental lawyer with expertise working with international environmental NGOs and state agencies in charge of environmental law enforcement and monitoring.